Climate News: The week in review

Canada's performance at the recent UN climate conference in Copenhagen came under scrutiny again
this week, after an internal Chinese government report was leaked
to British newspaper The Guardian. The report said Canada played a "conniving" role in trying to convince other
countries that its level of ambition on climate change would be adequate, and
claimed the US-led "umbrella group" of nations - of which Canada is a member -
adopted a "position of inaction" at the international climate negotiations. As Mike
de Souza reports for Canwest, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice
rejected those allegations, stating, "We were not conniving," and pointing at
China's reluctance to allow international monitoring of its own progress on
reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Since Copenhagen, Canada has not managed to shake its international reputation as an environmental laggard.But the Chinese government isn't alone in thinking less of
Canada in the wake of the U.N. climate summit - a new global
poll by Globescan/BBC released in the lead-up to the Vancouver Olympics
found that perceptions of Canada's influence abroad have declined in the past
year, with the greatest declines reported among residents of the U.S., the U.K.
and China. (Notably, the percentage of Canadians who feel Canada has a positive
influence internationally fell 11 percentage points to 75%, compared to 86% at
this time last year.) As the
CBC reports, pollsters and academics suspect that Canada's poor environmental
performance and growing opposition to oilsands development were at least
partly to blame.

Oilsands operations, such as this one bordering the Athabaska River in northern Alberta, are facing increasing opposition both in Canada and abroad. In a further show of such opposition, U.S.-based environmental
group Forest Ethics recently launched a
campaign encouraging influential corporations to formally state their opposition to high-carbon oilsands development. This week, that campaign prompted two U.S. Fortune
500 companies to announce plans to transition away from using fuel derived from the Canadian
oilsands in its trucking fleets, the Toronto
Star's Mitch
Potter reports. While some critics dismissed the announcement as
"greenwashing" to appeal to eco-minded consumers (noting that, once the crude
product from Alberta enters refineries, it gets mixed with product from other
sources and redistributed), others suggested the move - even if it's primarily
symbolic - sets an important precedent and could inspire other major companies
to follow suit, according to Shawn
McCarthy and Nathan VanderKlippe's report in the Globe and Mail.

Finally, as the week began with a meeting of the G7 finance
ministers in the Arctic, the CBC's Bob
MacDonald, host of the science and technology show Quirks and Quarks,
speculated that the ministers would be too busy discussing ways to maximize the
potential of open shipping lanes through the Arctic seas, that they would fail
to understand the seriousness of the climactic changes behind such
opportunities. Results from Canada's largest Arctic climate change study, reported
by the CBC, shed new light on those changes, as lead investigator David
Barber reports that arctic ice is melting "much faster than our most pessimistic projections."

Julia Kilpatrick

Julia oversees the Pembina Institute's communications department, including planning and strategy, media relations, audience engagement, and the development and delivery of the Institute’s many research publications and online resources.

Gelen — Apr 27, 2012 - 07:12 PM MT

Welcome to Balkingpoints diamondone1999! Nice to have anhetor Canadian onboard.Americans know that Canada has always been the best of neighbors and allies, of course. It's decision to leave Afghanistan has received scant coverage in the U.S. It routinely joins UN or NATO efforts as it did there, and prior to that in Bosnia.Most Americans have figured out as well, that Palin is a mental lightweight. Only a dunce would seriously suggest replacing a successful system with a failed one (Btw, you'd be amazed at the number of Americans duped into believing that Canadians have to wait months for routine medical care ;^)There has definitely been additional attention towards Canada during the Dark Ages debate over insuring all Americans. Lots of persons taken in by status quo propaganda from the GOP and health insurance giants, have tried to smear the Canadian Single Payer system as well as the also-successful NHS of the UK.But the fact that our system remains the First World's worst, wins those debates in any case. We're going to get a stupid, overpriced reform that amounts to a windfall for those insurers but all Americans will finally be able to get health insurance. (After we figure out in 20 years how wasteful that system is, we'll adopt Single Payer).Until your Balk I didn't realize Al Gore had been on Canada's case. Then a Google took me to this gem; The Urgent Threat to World Peace is … CanadaThe harm this country could do in the next two weeks will outweigh all the good it has done in a centuryBy George Monbiot. Published in the GuardianUK 20th November 2009When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peace-keeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.In 2006 the new Canadian government announced that it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%(1).It’s now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto Protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation(2). Never mind special measures; it won’t accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations from striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007 it single-handedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations(3). After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country which had done most to disrupt the talks(4). The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th(5).In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed that the government was scheming to divide the Europeans(6). During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying(7). Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada’s obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth(8).In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the well-being of the world.Why? There’s a simple answer. Canada is developing the world’s second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It’s actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, of pristine forests and marshes, will be dug up, unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil(9). The contaminated water is held in vast tailing ponds, some of which are so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface(10). Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases(11).Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes(12). Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions(13). By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark(14). Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.Canada hasn’t acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell(15), a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it(16). The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government’s share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten a38bn for exploiting the tar sands(17).The purpose of Canada’s assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada’s politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of rampaging Neanderthals to trample all over it. Timber companies were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government’s scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?a9 2009 Monbiot.com. Don't repost on Balkingpoints